State to post and host more data

Data from California’s public agencies will soon be housed under one roof, as part of a statewide push for accountability and transparency.

Officials from California Government Operations Agency, more commonly known as CalGovOps, announced last week plans to launch an open data portal to aggregate and publish all of California’s public agency data together to increase access to public information available about infrastructure, public health, health care, human services and other subjects.

Stuart Drown, deputy secretary of innovation and accountability for CalGovOps, said the initiative began in 2015 when CalGovOps launched an experimental portal, which had 11 data sets from three different departments.

The prototype can be found at greengov.data.ca.gov and features more than 70 datasets, maps, charts and other documents. One collection contains information about state vehicles, complete with cost, fuel usage, make, model and emission type. Other collections feature data from agencies’ waste management reports, or records of all contracts and grants purchased by state agencies from 2012 to 2015.

CalGovOps plans to add data sets from four additional departments by the end of February and replace the state’s current open data site, data.ca.gov, with a beta version in June. The site hasn’t published new information since December 2014, and mostly redirects visitors to other released data sets instead of providing the data itself from the state’s various departments and offices. The new site is expected to post — and host — fresher data.

The statewide initiative is similar to an initiative at the City of San Diego, which in July 2014 announced plans to post nearly all of its data online in a user-friendly web portal.

Since then, the city has hired a chief data officer to oversee the project and review data in the city’s possession. A list of some 2,000 data sets, half of which are considered public, has been compiled. The implementation plan predicts that the city will begin to “publish high value public data sets to its portal” in July of this year.